{4/5} “You’d think they’d never seen a girl and a cat on a broom before.”

Kiki is a young witch in training — that means, at age 13, she leaves home to live somewhere else for a year. She finds a town where the people initially seem unfriendly but she eventually finds some friendlier residents. With the help of a baker, she starts her own delivery service. She and her cat Jiji meet up with some interesting people delivering things to them.

Kiki’s Delivery Service was released in 1989. It’s a Japanese animated movie.

This is a gentle story, like My Neighbor Totoro. It’s aimed at kids, but adults won’t find anything to cringe about.

The world is close to the real one — except there are witches who can fly and cats who can talk.

It’s about growing up, and friendship — universal themes to be sure, but explored nicely here.

For most foreign language movies, I watch the subtitled version but this time I watched the dubbed one — so I was listening to the voices of Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia) as Kiki and Phil Hartman (the TV show NewsRadio) as Jiji.